The framers found a middle ground, not between principle and practice, but between opposition to slavery and majority consent. They produced a Constitution in which the concept of slavery is tolerated in deference to consent, but not given any moral approval in recognition of the slave’s natural rights. Nowhere in the document is the term “slavery” used. Slaves are always described as “persons,” implying their possession of natural rights. The founders were also careful to approve a Constitution that refuses to acknowledge the existence of racial distinctions, thus producing a document that transcended its time.
None of the supposed contradictions that contemporary scholars have located in the founding documents were unrecognized by the founders. Many of the framers justified their toleration of slavery on prudential grounds, for in the 1770s and 1780s they had reason to believe that slavery was losing its commercial appeal. In this they were wrong, because Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 (which the founders could not have anticipated) revived the demand for slavery in the South.
Even so, the test of the founders’ project is the practical consequence: did the founding strengthen or weaken the institution of slavery? The American Revolution should be judged by its consequences. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every state in America. Yet by 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery either immediately or gradually; southern and border states prohibited further slave importations from abroad; and Congress was committed to outlawing the slave trade in 1808, which it did. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.
Abraham Lincoln not only perceived the founders’ dilemma, he inherited it. The principle of popular rule is based on Jefferson’s doctrine that “all men are created equal,” yet the greatest crisis in American history arose when the people denied that “all men are created equal” and in so doing denied the basis of their own legitimacy. Lincoln had two choices: work to overthrow democracy, or work to secure consent through persuasion. Conscious that he, too, must defer, as the founders did, to prevailing prejudices, Lincoln nevertheless sought to neutralize those prejudices so they did not become a barrier to securing black freedom. In a series of artfully conditional claims—“If God gave the black man little, that little let him enjoy”—Lincoln paid ritual obeisance to existing racism while drawing even racists into his coalition to end slavery. He made these rhetorical concessions because he knew that the possibility for securing antislavery consent was far better in his time than in the 1780s.
Commenting on the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said of the founders: “They intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it must follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”17 By working through, rather than around, the democratic process, Lincoln justified the nation’s faith in the untried experiment of representative self-government. In vindicating the slave’s right to rule himself, Lincoln also vindicated the legitimacy of democratic self-rule. Thus it is accurate to say that Lincoln gave America a “new birth of freedom.”
Lincoln’s position came to be shared by Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the Constitution but who eventually reached the conclusion that it contained antislavery principles. “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered,” Douglass said. Slavery, he concluded, was merely “scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.”18 Douglass came to understand what contemporary multiculturalists apparently do not—that the best antislavery program is not necessarily support for the grandest impractical scheme but rather “is that which deals the deadliest blow upon slavery that can be given at a particular time.”19
It took a civil war to destroy slavery, and more than half a million whites were killed in that war, “one life for every six slaves freed,” C. Vann Woodward reminds us. But for Lincoln as for Douglass, the greatest white and black statesmen of the time, the triumph of the union and the emancipation of the slaves represented not the victory of might over right, but the reverse. Justice had won out over expediency, and the principles of the American founding had at long last been realized. The founders exercised wisdom and prudence in producing a charter for a society immeasurably better than the one in which they found themselves. History has vindicated their philosophical statesmanship. Black Americans and indeed all of us owe the American founders a profound debt of gratitude.
Having examined the issue of slavery, let us now discuss racism. Racism is a doctrine of innate or biological superiority. In its classic form, it leads to discrimination, which deprives members of victimized groups the equal protection of the laws. While slavery ended in the United States nearly a century and a half ago, racism continues to exist. Many African-American leaders insist that it is as bad as, if not worse than, it ever was. “Racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment,” says Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.20 “Racism is an integral, permanent and indestructible component of this society,” writes legal scholar Derrick Bell.21 These writers hold societal racism responsible for the current problems of blacks. Is America to blame because African-Americans are not doing as well as members of other groups?
As an immigrant, I am constantly surprised by how much I hear racism talked about and how little I actually see it. (Even fewer are the incidents in which I have experienced it directly.) When one examines the policies of universities, companies, and the government, one finds that they actually discriminate in favor of African-Americans and other minority groups, and against white males. Socially most Americans go out of their way to cater to, and to avoid offending, blacks. Such measures seem unlikely in a racist society. There are specific incidents of racism and specific victims, to be sure, but the very fact that we can identify them proves that they are not typical, and the ensuing outcry shows the degree to which racism has become stigmatized in American society.
For the past several years I have been speaking at American colleges on the issue of affirmative action. Inevitably some student or professor will harangue me about how indispensable racial preferences are at that particular school because of the pervasiveness of racism and discrimination. I then ask, “Do you know of any bigots in your admissions office who are trying to keep blacks and Hispanics out?” Not once has my question led to the identification of any bigots.
Where, then, is the racism? At this point my interlocutor typically makes the Jesse Jackson maneuver: having failed to locate overt racism, he insists upon the pervasiveness of covert racism. The absence of individual racism inspires the allegation of “institutional racism.” And in this case the culprit is the admissions standard used by the selective college to decide who gets in. In particular, the villain of the story turns out to be the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). This test, we hear, is racially and culturally biased.
I took the SAT myself in the late 1970s, and it didn’t seem to me that it had been prepared by the Ku Klux Klan. The SAT seeks to measure verbal ability, reading comprehension, mathematical skill, and logical and reasoning aptitude, all of which seem quite relevant to performing well in college. It is conceivable that some questions on the verbal section of the test are biased, in that they refer to material outside the normal experience of inner-city blacks. But let us focus, for a moment, on the math section. The typical question goes like this: “If an automobile can go at a speed of 75 miles per hour, how far can it go in 40 minutes?” No one can maintain with a straight face that simple equations are racially biased, or that algebra is rigged against Hispanics. Yet the performance gaps between blacks and whites are greater on the math
section than on the verbal section.
What this suggests is that the test is accurately measuring not innate capacity but differences of academic performance. And on those measures of merit that selective colleges typically use, not all racial groups do equally well. So far I have focused on a single test, so let me expand my argument by asking you to envision any test that measures intellectual achievement or economic performance. It may be a reading test given to six-year-olds, or a math test given to fifteen-year-olds, or the law school admission test, or the graduate record exam, or the business school test, or the firefighters test, or the police sergeant test, or the civil service exam. It doesn’t matter—you name the test. Now if your chosen test is today administered to a hundred randomly selected members from each of four groups—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-American—I will tell you in advance the result. Whites and Asians will do the best, Hispanics will fall in the middle, and African-Americans, alas, will do the least well.
For the past several years, I have challenged leading African-American scholars to give me a single example of a test that violates the pattern of results that I have identified here. None of them have been able to do so. This is a serious problem for those who blame racial bias for the comparatively poor test results of African-Americans. It is conceivable that this test or that test is flawed or biased, but to maintain that every test, in every subject, in every part of the country, is conspiratorially biased in the same way—this is absurd.
The simple truth is that merit, not racism, is responsible for performance differences on the test. Merit, not racism, is the primary obstacle to enrolling larger numbers of blacks and Hispanics in selective universities. This realization has come as a surprise to many leaders of the civil rights movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. championed the cause of merit against that of nepotism and racial favoritism. All we are asking, King said, is that we be judged on our merits as individuals, based on the content of our character and not the color of our skins.
Eventually the leaders of the United States agreed to this. There were strong pockets of resistance, especially in the South, but the heroic persistence of King and his supporters was vindicated. There was a series of landmark rulings and laws—Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Bill—which established equality of rights under the law for all citizens. Merit became the operating standard, just as King demanded. King fully expected that merit would produce diversity and that equality of rights for individuals would lead to equality of results for groups.
It has been a generation since King’s death, and we now see that King’s premise was false. Equality of rights for individuals has not led to equality of results for groups. Merit, like racism, produces inequality. And inequalities produced by merit are far more justifiable than inequalities produced by favoritism or racism. Consider the example of the National Basketball Association. African-Americans are 12 percent of the population but more than 75 percent of NBA players. Why, then, do we not hear demands for more Jews and Asians to be represented on the courts? Presumably because it is merit that is producing this racially disproportionate result. If coaches are picking the best dribblers and passers and shooters, then who cares if one group has more players and another group has less?
If this seems like a sensible approach, it should also be applied to universities, and corporations, and government jobs. But here the civil rights leaders face a nightmare scenario. They know that merit standards, applied in a neutral or color-blind way, are likely to result in a kind of racial hierarchy, with blacks at the bottom. The prospect of this upsets many blacks and embarrasses many whites. Racial preferences are a way to appease black discontent and reduce white embarrassment. They have nothing to do with fighting racism. Not a single one of the black or Hispanic students preferentially admitted to colleges over the years has shown that he or she has been victimized by racism. Nor have any of the white and Asian students who have been turned away, despite better grades, test scores, and extracurricular talents, been shown to have discriminated against anyone.
A just social policy seeks to benefit those who have been harmed and impose the cost on those who have done the harming. This is not what racial preference policies do. They seek to camouflage the performance differences between racial groups and to benefit less-qualified members of some groups at the expense of more-qualified members of other groups. By applying two different standards—a higher one to Asians and whites, and a lower one to blacks and Hispanics—admissions officers and corporate recruiters can show a diverse outcome and pretend that all groups are performing equally well. The racial caste society is averted, but at the expense of undermining two bedrock American principles—the principle of merit and the principle of equal rights under the law.
Preferences create the illusion that blacks are competitive with whites, but wouldn’t it be better for blacks in fact to be competitive with whites? To see how this could be possible, we must candidly discuss the reasons for the merit gap. Why is it the case that on virtually every measure of academic ability and economic performance, African-Americans do poorly in comparison with other groups? In this debate there are three positions.
The first position can be identified with The Bell Curve, the controversial book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. In it the authors contend that there may be natural, biological differences between the races that account for their unequal levels of performance.22 The Bell Curve was written as an argument against racial preferences, although to my mind it offers the strongest possible argument in support of such preferences. After all, if group differences are large, innate, and ineradicable, then the only alternative to a racial caste society is to set up multiple measures of performance (a kind of Special Olympics) so that all groups can enjoy a measure of reward and recognition. Let us call the argument advanced by Herrnstein and Murray the genetic position.
The genetic position has been challenged, for the better part of a century, by what may be termed the liberal position. The liberal position, argued by scholars such as Andrew Hacker, Christopher Jencks, and William Julius Wilson, says that the reason for group differences in academic achievement and economic performance is that society artificially creates such differences. In this view, societal oppression, and specifically racism, causes group inequalities that otherwise would not exist.
The genetic and the liberal view have been at odds for decades, and they operate like a seesaw: when one is up, the other is down. In the early part of the twentieth century, the genetic view was predominant. Most people assumed that there were natural differences between groups that explained why some did better than others. But in the 1950s and 1960s, the genetic view came under sustained assault. The liberals said: How can you say that blacks are doing poorly due to some supposed natural deficit? Look at all the discrimination to which they are subjected. This argument was entirely plausible, which is why the genetic view began to lose support and the liberal view became the conventional wisdom.
Today, however, the liberal view has become intellectually bankrupt. To see why this is so, consider the SAT. Both on the verbal and the math section of the test, Asian-Americans and whites who come from poor families—let us say, families earning below $20,000 a year—score higher than African-Americans who come from well-off families—say, families earning over $60,000 a year.23 This fact, which is easy to verify and is not denied by any informed person in the race debate, destroys the old canard that tests are mere calibrators of socioeconomic privilege. But it also poses a grave challenge to the liberal position itself. Recall that the liberal view attributes group differences in performance to racism. But how could racism operate in such a way that it enables poor whites and Asians to score higher on math tests than upper-middle-class African-Americans? When I pose this question to liberal scholars, they usually call me insulting names.
So the debate is at a tragic standoff between two unacceptable alternatives: the ge
netic position and the liberal position. To break the deadlock, a group of scholars—including Thomas Sowell, Orlando Patterson, and Shelby Steele—has offered a third position that I support. This may be called the cultural position. This view holds that there are cultural, which is to say behavioral, differences between groups. These are observable in everyday life, they can be measured by the usual techniques of social science, and they can be directly related to academic achievement and economic success.
A few years ago sociologist Sanford Dornbusch and his colleagues were puzzled by the persistence of large differences in academic performance between Asian-Americans and African-Americans. They were disturbed by the possibility that these differences might be due to natural or genetic factors. So Dornbusch and his colleagues conducted a comparative study of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students. Here is what they found: “In general Asian-American students devote relatively more time to their studies, are more likely to attribute their success to hard work, and are more likely to report that their parents have high standards for school performance. . . . In contrast, African-American and Hispanic students are more cavalier about the consequences of poor school performance, devote less time to their studies, are less likely than others to attribute their success to hard work, and report that their parents have relatively lower standards.”24
Obviously this doesn’t settle the issue; one may ask, “But why do Asian-Americans and African-Americans show these differences in attitude and behavior?” Undoubtedly many complex factors are involved, but one that is worth mentioning is the two-parent family. It seems obvious that two parents will have, on average, more time than a single parent to invest in a child’s upbringing, discipline, homework supervision, and so on. What is the illegitimacy rate in the Asian-American community? Less than 5 percent. In the African-American community? Nearly 70 percent!
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